Avoid Using These Launch Phrases to Describe People
Being called crazy only makes you feel crazy. It’s an uploaded term – an insensitive label for someone prone to uncontrollable outbursts or violent behavior – but it’s often used to refer to anyone who can’t behave in a conventionally “normal” way.
It is one of those words that we use too lightly and are combined with other insensitive, once ubiquitous terms that are now considered eiblistic (including the “r-word”). Calling someone crazy may sound frivolous, but it can be harmful, as comedian Dave Chappel pointed out in a 2006 interview with Inside The Actor’s Studio . During the interview, he was palpably upset about how to call others crazy because he dodged the spotlight after traveling to Africa to avoid media attention over the success of The Chappelle Show.
It seemed like a radical idea at the time, but Chappelle, who has received a fair amount of justifiable criticism for his own problematic comments about the transgender community, was right. And that sentiment only picked up steam as social mores in general evolved towards less degrading people who fight.
This goes far beyond calling people “crazy”: there are many other phrases that you must pick out from your vocabulary – along with colleagues and not only – that can evoke in other people, whatever your own intentions may be. in their use.
Calling someone “crazy” or “abnormal”
The concept of “mad” or “crazy” is inherently dismissive, because it does not even touch that can cause discomfort in the person. Being called crazy reinforces the stigma that suggests that the person who is struggling is weak and in some way outside the norm.
As Brenda Curtis, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, explained in 2018 :
“One of the common stereotypes about mental health and substance use disorders is the idea of moral decline. Many people will think, “Oh, they’re just sad, stop it” or “Oh, if you don’t want to use drugs, just stop, no one forced you to do this.”
It is also an insult that is mostly inflicted on women. The word is most commonly used to describe women and is often used by men who are themselves known to be hermetic seals of repressed emotions . If your friend or coworker is acting unpleasant or interfering with your behavior, find the exact way to talk to him about it. Don’t call them crazy.
Suggestion that someone is “on the spectrum”
Comparing someone’s social tics or awkwardness to autism is also insensitive. In one fell swoop, you managed to simultaneously play the office psychologist and paint a wide range of people with autism spectrum disorder with one brush. Again, comparing someone’s perceived communication deficiencies with autism means whitewashing broader circumstances that may bother them, whether autism is one of them or not.
There is a very specific list of symptoms common to people with ASD and related disorders such as Asperger’s Syndrome. You must know what you are talking about before making such a statement. When you use it casually, you are doing a disservice to the person you are talking about and to autistic people everywhere.
Call your neat colleague “OCD”
As with autism, you should never reduce the debilitating state to some kind of verbal abuse. Extremely organized, tidy, and clean people are often put into camp by others who witness superficial behavior and extrapolate larger judgments from there. Don’t use frivolous phrases that serve as an overarching diagnosis for people who may simply be more focused on being organized or neat, which you think is normal. Even if the person in question doesn’t mind – or uses it to describe their own behavior – it can harm the person who actually suffers from the condition by making it look like a simple affectation.
In fact, obsessive-compulsive disorder is a mentally debilitating illness that wages war on a person’s emotional well-being. As Lisa Whittington-Mill recently wrote about her struggle with OCD :
When a voice in my head doesn’t tell me that I have to check the stove repeatedly to make sure it’s turned off, otherwise my apartment will catch fire, the voice tells me that I’m imperfect – I’m a failure because I can’t silence it. So I push myself to work harder, do better, and achieve more. I’m so disappointed in myself that I turn that disappointment into an almost impossible level of perfectionism. Stress only makes things worse. When there are things that I cannot control, I focus on my compulsions, which sometimes seem to be the only thing I can control.
Calling a thin person anorexic or bulimic
This is perhaps the most obvious example, but discussing someone’s body from this point of view (alone or otherwise) should never be. An estimated 20 million women and 10 million men will suffer from an eating disorder at some point in their lives, fighting against impulses that cause psychological and physical damage. Claiming that anyone you think is underweight is suffering from an eating disorder places the stigma of mental instability on the person you are talking about – someone who may very well have body dysmorphia or an eating disorder and who does not need to hear from you have any judgment on this matter.
These terms – and many others you can pronounce every day without thinking – should be easy to cross out of your vocabulary because there are many ways to express yourself without demonizing or belittling a group of already marginalized people.